[flud-devel] DHT justifications (was: DHT Performance? Design?)

[Bill Broadley]

Alen Peacock wrote:
> On Nov 11, 2007 9:14 AM, Alen Peacock <alenlpeacock at gmail.com> wrote:
>>   flud is a pure mirroring backup service, not a generic storage grid.
>>  Rather than complicating things to support a non use case, flud just
>> requires that the initiator retain a copy
> 
>   BTW, that's not to say that doing something a bit more sophisticated
> isn't a good option for a generic storage service

I don't think of the equivalent of a traditional backup system as storage
grid.  I agree that archival use is a different problem.  Archival use
is often left out of other backup systems as well (like backuppc).  Amanda
was tape based so you could take a tape rotation out of service, but it didn't
really support integrated archival use.

> or even for an
> archival service -- just that flud's scope is intentionally narrower
> than that.

Seems like a small tweak to me for a major increase in protection for users
of flud.  Maybe it should be flud mirror instead of flud backup.  Wikipedia
seems to agree:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backups

First paragraph:

  Backups are useful primarily for two purposes. The first is to restore a
  computer to an operational state following a disaster (called disaster
  recovery). The second is to restore small numbers of files after they have
  been accidentally deleted or corrupted.[1]

IMO, a mirroring system that would delete a file a file within an arbitrarily
short window (say you edit your thesis just before the cron job) isn't really 
a backup system.